If I were to be the Mayor of Bengaluru

Citizen Matters recently invited essays from citizens on how they would go about things if they were to become the "Mayor of Bengaluru". The following is what I submitted.

The 74th amendment to the Constitution, passed decades back, envisaged a powerful Mayor and Council, equivalent to the city, as the Chief Minister and the Cabinet are to the state. Unfortunately, with the state governments (whichever the ruling dispensation) and legislature holding onto the powers, the Mayor and the Council have largely been rendered powerless, even as the complexities of the city's governance have multiplied with its exponential expansion, leading to the total chaos and decay we see all around. So, first and foremost, as the Mayor, I'd move heaven and earth to empower the local administration to enable it to manage the challenge.

Currently, there are some 18 functions that are under the Municipal Council, the major ones among them being roads, foot-paths, storm-water drains, street-lighting, Solid Waste Management, Primary Healthcare, Municipal schools, Crematoriums, etc. Unfortunately, the BBMP has not been able to build up capacity to manage even these effectively. The lack of ownership by the MLA's (who wield the actual control, and most of whom are outsiders as far as the city is concerned) apart, the lack of adequate financial resources is also a major factor. For a city that generates almost three-fourths of the state's revenue, its municipality (BBMP) gets allotted just a pittance. Further, the levy and collection of property tax, which is the biggest direct source of the city's revenue, is gone about so unprofessionally, perhaps deliberately so, that the total collection ends up a fraction of the full potential estimated by citizen experts.

As a Mayor, I'd straightaway outsource the entire property tax assessment, levy and collection job to a professional agency, quite like Income Tax, Passport and such departments have already done for their back-end work. Leading from this, I will also have the city digitally mapped making available all information, whether on ward offices, SWM handling centres, utility lines/ offices, police stations, etc etc, readily on the net.

Now, the 74th amendment has envisaged answerability of all utilities too to the municipality. As comapred to that, in Bengaluru, the parastatals (BESCOM, BMTC, BWSSB, etc) that manage the key infrastructure areas are answerable only to the state legislature, which is as good or bad as not being answerable at all. This is a matter that calls for immediate correction.

But, with each of these being very specialised fields, it will be well nigh impossible for a municipal body to effectively manage directly, and as such, I'd again outsource them to professional agencies. In this regard, you already have Tata's, Reliance, Torrent, etc doing a fairly good job of managing power supply (near 100% reliability) in Mumbai, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Surat, etc, as compared to the large gen-set dependency in Bengaluru, poorly served as it is currently by government-owned BESCOM. In the case of bus services, you have ZipGo, CityFlo, Ola, Uber, VRL and perhaps even TVS (who were in the field long ago) ready to grab the huge business opportunity, if their entry is facilitated properly, and the citizens too are waiting impatiently for efficient services, fed up largely as they are of the BMTC monopoly in the field.

In the area of water supply (as also sewerage management) too, many cities in the UK have privatised/ outsourced the jobs to professional players, and are better of for it all. Their rivers and lakes are now back to nurturing bountiful flora and fauna, as compared to what they were earlier, not too different from what it is like in Bengaluru today, mis-handled as the job is by the fully government controlled BWSSB. The tragedy of it all is that 1450 MLD of water is pumped from Cauvery, up some 500M and a distance of close to 100 KM, at a tremendous cost, of which over 45% become "unaccounted for" after reaching Bengaluru. Plainly, there is very little accountability when these jobs are handled totally by the parastatal, BWSSB. Within the country too, cities like Nagpur, and a few in Karnataka itself, are experimenting with models involving professional players. I would engage with an expert team to recommend the best of options to bring in more professionalism and thereby accountability into this most critical area.

Even in the 18 odd functions being carried out by the municipality currently, there is huge scope for greater efficiency and customer orientation, and as such, most functions are best outsourced to professional players. Ultimately, the government's (ULB's) job needs to be just governance - meaning facilitation, regulation, and control (where essential) of the functioning of the professional agencies to whom the jobs have been outsourced, therewith being accountable to the people who have elected them.

Actually, it is the poor who are the biggest sufferers of the inefficiency of the utilities, since the rich can always find alternatives, however costly they may be. And, where the question of affordability may arise, subsidies may be offered via DBT (direct benefit transfer) into the bank accounts of the identified beneficiaries, quite like it is already happening in the case of gas supplies.

And, as for overall city governance, as the Mayor, I would adopt the "Sri B S Patil committee" recommendations (check here) for decentralised governance of the now overly grown and exponentially expanding city. I would also use my position to revitalise the Bengaluru Metropolitan Planning Committee and steer it to ensure development of the city in an environmentally and economically sustainable way.

Implementing all of these will automatically turn Bengaluru into a "smart city" with much improved citizen's life quality.

Forget winning the contest, apparently my entry wasn't even under the consideration of the jury. On going through the criteria, once again, I noticed that the proposals needed to be "practical", and I expect that's where I failed.

My emphasis was largely on 'professionalisation' of services, which in effect meant privatisation/ out-sourcing, with government concentrating on governance - meaning facilitation, regulation, and control (where essential) of the professional players. Very clearly, Bengaluru citizens at large, including the enlightened ones who drew up the contest criteria, as well as the jury members, still entertain a 'phobia' of the private sector, perhaps resulting out of their largely 'Socialist' outlook engendered by the preponderance of PSU's in the city. Well, even as the PSU's have largely been marginalised by the IT sector, over the past decades, which has in turn engendered its own style of Capitalism, the outlook of the people has apparently changed only from 'Socialism' to 'pseudo-Socialism'. And, the wily set of neta-babu combo are making the most of it, but at huge cost to the city.

In the course of a debate over privatisation of power supply, on a 'whatsapp' group, a member, apparently still in the 'Socialist' mind-set, had commented that there may not be much to choose between the two 'monsters'. I responded saying that I will be more than happy to live with a 'monster' that can perform as well as TataPDDL (check here).

Well, unmindful of what others may think, what matters to me most is the endorsement of my view (with a like, on my twitter post) by none other than the redoubtable, Mr Manivannan, IAS. Thank you, Sir.

The Mayor and council does have powers no doubt and there is no dearth of money either..even if it means there are over drafts..or else how would they fund projects like church st improvements..

However there are loop holes designed in the approval process which are exploited by the MLA/Corporators. All projects less than 1 Crore does not need to go through the council.

The engineers are deviously smart to circumvent the system by splitting a road improvement projects into smaller chunks of less than 1 cr, so that the council is never involved in approvals..and further the projects are bagged mostly by relatives/friends of the area politicians..so money stays close..

Also, reusability is followed very well..for example if the side drains needs work..the same stones will be reused..but the bill will be for fresh ones..they will also cost for disposal of waste ..where there has been no wastage at all!

The debate @ https://www.youtube.com/w... on "Mirror Now", on the stopping of further construction of apartment complexes, was forwarded to me by a friend, and so, I decided to make this post.

If high-rise apartments are dis-allowed, but IT industry growth allowed, responding to the huge demand, where will all the 'techies', from all over (including from the city who may want to live independently), live? In independent houses? Can they afford it, given the huge land cost? Firstly, where is the land for it in the already overgrown city? Do you want to stretch the city limits beyond Hoskote, Attibele, Kanakpura, Magadi, Ramnagara, Nelamangala, Dodballapur, Chickaballapur, etc? Yes, developing satellite towns in all of these places is perhaps one of the answers, and it was keeping that in mind, that "Praja-RAAG" has from long (joined recently by others too) been demanding development of the "commuter rail (Namma Railu - http://praja.in/en/nammar... )" system, but which hasn't made much progress, tossed about as it has been between the Centre and the State.

As good, or even better, would be if the government chooses to spread the growth to the other cities in the state, towards which one is happy to note the fist step in the form of the flagging off of the Superfast Overnight daily rail services to Belgavi (through important cities like Tumkur, Davangere, Hubli, etc). Another low hanging fruit would be in the form of 100% reliable power supply like in Delhi (involving the private sector) - check @ http://praja.in/en/blog/m... . A few more such initiatives, and it will all happen.

What is however most shocking is the assigning of the blame for all of Bengaluru's problems (by the few - old-world denizens?) on the high-rise dwellings. It is a proven fact that the carbon foot-print of the high-rise dweller is the lowest for any dweller in a city. Besides, we at Bangalore Apartments' Federation (https://baf.org.in/), a federation of over 400 apartment complexes across the city, would like to claim that we are amongst the most civic conscious of citizens, with

our per capita water consumption (and consequent sewage generation) being the lowest,

all of our members adopting rain-water harvesting practices to the extent possible,

all practicing near 100% waste segregation,

many going in for roof-top solar power generation,

car-pooling for wor-day commute, and many such sustainable initiatives.

Comprising largely of techies, exposed to best practices across the world, in every field, our members are constantly throwing up suggestions too for the sustainable development of the city, and if the government chooses to engage with us, we can offer solutions to all of the city's problems.

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